On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 2:47 PM, Kevin M Levey <<a href="mailto:klevey@customweather.com">klevey@customweather.com</a>> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div style="">TUE 20MAY08: 1140PDT<div><br></div><div>Dear Grads Users</div><div><br></div><div>I was always under the impression that one could NOT write out NETCDF files from GRADS directly, but that you had to use LATS4D to accomplish this.</div>
<div><br></div><div>However, on the latest update of the GRADS pages found at: <span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;"><a href="http://grads.iges.org/grads/downloads.html" target="_blank">http://grads.iges.org/grads/downloads.html</a></span></div>
<div><br></div><div>I see this: </div><div><br></div><div><div style="margin: 0px;">The GrADS exectuables for versions <b>1.9 </b>and earlier are as follows:</div><div style="margin: 0px;">gradsc <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Reads GRIB, gridded binary, BUFR, GrADS station data</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">Writes GRIB</div><div style="margin: 0px;"><b><font color="#ff141f">gradsnc</font></b> Reads GRIB, gridded binary, BUFR, GrADS station data, NetCDF</div><div style="margin: 0px;"><b>Writes </b>GRIB, <font color="#ff141f"><b>NetCDF</b></font></div>
</div><div><br></div><div>Is this a mistake, and if not, how does one write NETCDF formatted output directly from GRADS 1.9b4? I thought one could only write gridded binary files. I have never been able to find any documentation regarding this (writing NETCDF output from GRADS). I know that version 2.0 is slated to have the NETCDF "write" functionality built into it in upcoming releases.</div>
<div></div></div></blockquote><div><br>Since v1.7 you can write NetCDF/HDF and GRIB-1 files from GrADS using the LATS interface. Basically you do a bunch of "set lats ..." commands, do a "set gxout lats" and when you display a variable it goes into your netcdf or grib-1 file. Lats4d is simply a GrADS script that serves as a frontend to the LATS interface, a convenience script of sorts. (BTW, lats4d can also serve as a front end to "set gxout fwrite".) Unfortunately, the LATS interface has been removed from v2, so the only thing lats4d can do there is to write binaries.<br>
<br>I am not aware of any documentation for the LATS interface. I learned how use it by following Mike Fiorino's examples. Lats4d has a built in man page that documents (almost) all of its options (I left some NASA specific options undocumented as they are not relevant to the general user.)<br>
<br> Arlindo<br><br></div></div><br>-- <br>Arlindo da Silva<br><a href="mailto:dasilva@alum.mit.edu">dasilva@alum.mit.edu</a>